The Ideology of Post-Maoist China

  • A. James Gregor
Chapter

Abstract

For the People’s Republic of China, the decade of the 1980s was determinative. In those years post-Maoist China assumed some clearly discernible and distinctive features—not lost to this day. Beginning in the final years of the 1970s, and concluding in the first years of the 1990s, Deng Xiaoping recreated the China left by Mao Zedong, producing the remarkable nation that thereafter was to fascinate the world. At the end of the 1970s, Deng called for China’s revolutionaries to abandon leftist dogmatism, “emancipate the mind,” “seek truth from facts,”3 and understand that measurable results constituted the “sole test of truth.”4 In effect, by the 1980s Deng advanced successful performance not only as the sole criterion of truth but also as the basis of political legitimacy. The rule of a single party was no longer to be legitimized by a cathecetic appeal to the sacred texts of the founders, or by dicta emanating from an individual, all-knowing political luminary, but by its successful public performance—and for Deng, that performance turned on the rapid development of the material productive forces.5

Keywords

Productive Force Communist Party Select Work Class Struggle Socialist Society 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    Deng Xiaoping, “We Shall Expand Political Democracy and Carry Out Economic Reform,” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1982–1992) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 121–22.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Deng, “Hold High the Banner of Mao Zedong Thought and Adhere to the Principle of Seeking Truth from Facts,” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975–1982) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), 141–43.Google Scholar
  3. 10.
    Maurice Meisner makes the best case possible for Chinese collectivized agriculture. See Maurice Meisner, Th3e Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism 1978–1994 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), chaps. 8 and 9. The fact remains that the per capita production of grain, China’s principal food crop, was approximately the same in 1975 as it had been in 1957 when Mao celebrated the “high tide of collectivization”—which, in the final analysis, meant not only that productivity was stagnant but also that the rural standard of living had not improved in two decades.Google Scholar
  4. 40.
    I have provided a more systematic treatment of these distinctions in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: The Free Press, 1969), 3–6.Google Scholar
  5. 47.
    “By 1975, officials had heard about the takeof of the four little dragons (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) all capitalist countries that were growing more rapidly than the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.” Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 125–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. 61.
    As a case in point, the developmental system of the Nationalists on Taiwan managed to maintain a high equality index on the Gini scale of income distribution. See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Maria Hsia Chang, and Andrew B. Zimmerman, Ideology and Development: Sun Yat-sen and the Economic History of Taiwan (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1981), chap. 4.Google Scholar
  7. 62.
    One of the more comprehensive discussions of these issues is to be found in Sun Yat-sen, The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen (New York: AMS Press, 1974), part 3, lecture 2 of “Economic Demism” or Minsheng. Translated by M. Paschal and S. J. D’Elia, this is one of the better translations of Sun’s Sanminchui and is a reproduction of the Wuchang edition of 1931.Google Scholar
  8. 63.
    Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (Taipei: China Cultural Service, 1953, originally published in 1922), 9.Google Scholar
  9. 66.
    Sun Yat-sen, “Statement on Fundamentals of National Reconstruction,” Fundamentals of National Reconstruction (Taipei: China Cultural Service, 1953), 4–5.Google Scholar
  10. 72.
    See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  11. 73.
    This, of course, was the essence of Karl Kautsky’s objections to Marxism-Leninism. See, for example, his discussion in 1918, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat; his 1919 work, Terrorism and Communism; and his publication in 1921, From Democracy to State Slavery—and A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), chap. 4.Google Scholar
  12. 75.
    With regard to all this, Kalpana Misra speaks of Deng Xiaoping’s “limitations as a theoretician, or his lack of interest in the finer aspects of ideological discourse.” Kalpana Misra, From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ideology in Deng’s China (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183.Google Scholar
  13. 80.
    For a more detailed discussion of Lenin’s relationship with Marxist philosophy, see A. James Gregor, A Survey of Marxism: Problems in Philosophy and the Theory of History (New York: Random House, 1965), chap. 3.Google Scholar
  14. 81.
    Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Collected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), vol. 14.Google Scholar
  15. 85.
    For a more complete exposition, see A. James Gregor, “Lenin on the Nature of Sensations,” Studies on the Left, vol. 3, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 34–42.Google Scholar
  16. 87.
    J. Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 713–45.Google Scholar
  17. 89.
    Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 457–58.Google Scholar
  18. 93.
    See, for example, Engels’ correspondence with C. Schmidt (August 5, 1890, and October 27, 1890), J. Bloch (September 21–22, 1890), and H. Starkenburg (January 25, 1894), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. 2, 486–96, 504–6.Google Scholar
  19. 94.
    Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971, first published in 1922), 5.Google Scholar
  20. 96.
    For a discussion of the philosophical sources of Sun’s ideology, see A. James Gregor, “Confucianism ad the Political Thought of Sun Yat-sen,” Philosophy East and West, vol. 31, no. 1 (January 1981): 55–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. 98.
    See the rendering of Mazzini’s thought in Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 22.Google Scholar
  22. 100.
    Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 271.Google Scholar
  23. 105.
    For a more comprehensive treatment of these issues, see A. James Gregor, “Changing Concepts of Logic in Soviet Philosophy,” Duquesne Review, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 1968): 87–100.Google Scholar
  24. 108.
    See Sidney Hook, Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy (New York: Random House, 1950), 203.Google Scholar
  25. 109.
    For a more extensive discussion, see A. James Gregor, Metascience and Politics: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Language of Political Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 203), chap. 4.Google Scholar
  26. 110.
    See, for example, Bill Brugger, ed., Chinese Marxism in Flux 1978–1984 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985);Google Scholar
  27. Bill Brugger and David Kelly, Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era 1978–1984 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
  28. 119.
    For the distinction between “thought” (sixiang) and “theory” (lilun), see Maria Hsia Chang, The Labors of Sisyphus: The Economic Development of Communist China (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 22–23.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© A. James Gregor 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • A. James Gregor

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations